Telecom industry needs to up its green game Green action far less common than green talk: telcos and their vendors need to do more to push down carbon footprints, focusing on renewables; China lags

Telecom industry needs to up its green game Green action far less common than green talk: telcos and their vendors need to do more to push down carbon footprints, focusing on renewables; China lags

This note addresses carbon footprint trends in the telecom industry. We present data on emissions by the telecom services sector and their major suppliers in the 2020-22 period, and assess industry trends.

Telecom is not big enough to save the planet, but every industry sector needs to do its part (and then some) to ease global warming. Unfortunately, beyond the fluffy rhetoric, the telecom industry is underperforming. In 2022, based on a large sample of telcos, the sum of scope 1 and 2 carbon emissions was 132 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent (MT CO2e). That is flat relative to 2021. Energy consumption continues to grow by 3-4% per year in telco services, and the use of renewables is growing only modestly: from about 10% of total consumption in 2020, to 15% in 2022. A few telcos have made concerted efforts to buy credits or offsets for Scope 2 emissions, and are able to report “market-based” scope 2 emissions which are declining rapidly. But, these are exceptions and almost all in Europe; notable examples are BT, Deutsche Telekom, and Vodafone.